dear, tell mi madre my last look at the house, my last thought in
leaving it, was for her. She would not kiss me or bless me last night.
Ask her to kiss you for me," and then the lad broke fairly down. The
moment had come in which love could find no utterance, and must act. He
flung his arm around his father's neck and kissed him. And the father
wept also, and yet spoke brave words to both as he walked with them
to the gate and watched them ride into the thick mist lying upon the
prairie like a cloud. They were only darker spots in it. It swallowed
them up. They were lost to sight.

He thought no one had seen the boys leave but himself. But through the
lattices two sorrowful women also watched their departure. The Senora,
as wakeful as her husband, had heard the slight movements, the unusual
noises of that early hour, and had divined the cause of them. She looked
at Rachela. The woman had fallen into the dead sleep of exhaustion, and
she would not have to parry her objections and warnings. Unshod, and
in her night-dress, she slipped through the corridor to the back of the
house, and tightly clasping her rosary in her hands, she stood behind
the lattice and watched her boy away.

He turned in his saddle just before he passed the gate, and she saw his
young face lifted with an unconscious, anxious love, to the very lattice
at which she stood: In the dim light it had a strange pallor. The misty
air blurred and made all indistinct. It was like seeing her Jack in some
woful dream. If he had been dead, such a vision of him might have come
to her from the shadow land.

Usually her grief was noisy and imperative of sympathy. But this morning
she could not cry nor lament. She went softly back to her room and sat
down, with her crucifix before her aching eyes. Yet she could not
say her usual prayers. She could not remember anything but Jack's
entreaty--"Kiss me, mi madre! Bless me, mi madre!" She could not see
anything but that last rapid turn in the saddle, and that piteous young
face, showing so weird and dreamlike through the gray mist of the early
dawn.

Antonia had watched with her. Dare, also, had turned, but there had
been something about Dare's attitude far more cheery and hopeful. On the
previous night Antonia had put some sprays of rosemary in his hat band
"to bring good, and keep away evil on a journey"; and as he turned and
lifted his hat he put his lips to them. He had the belief that from some
point his Antoni